SOA-C02 Leak Questions

Step-by-Step Explanation:

Understand the Problem:

Enforce a policy that requires all AWS resources to be tagged according to company policy.

Continuously identify non-compliant resources.

Analyze the Requirements:

Implement a solution to monitor and enforce resource tagging compliance.

Evaluate the Options:

Option A: AWS CloudTrail.

Provides logging and monitoring of API calls but does not enforce tagging policies.

Option B: Amazon Inspector.

Primarily used for security assessments, not resource tagging compliance.

Option C: AWS Config.

Monitors and evaluates the configurations of AWS resources.

Can enforce compliance by using AWS Config rules to check resource tags.

Option D: AWS Systems Manager.

Provides operational insights and management but is not specifically designed for compliance enforcement.

Select the Best Solution:

Option C: AWS Config is designed for compliance and configuration monitoring, making it the ideal service for enforcing and identifying non-compliant resource tags.

References:

AWS Config

Managing Resource Tag Compliance with AWS Config

AWS Config provides the necessary tools to enforce and monitor resource tagging compliance, ensuring all resources adhere to the set policy.

To improve security and availability, the best approach is to configure Multi-AZ for both the web and database tiers.

Multi-AZ Auto Scaling for Web Tier: Deploying the web-tier instances in an Auto Scaling group across multiple AZs with an internet-facing ALB provides high availability and fault tolerance.

RDS Multi-AZ for SQL Server: Migrating the SQL Server to RDS with Multi-AZ deployment ensures database redundancy and failover without additional management overhead.

Placing the web tier in multiple Regions would add unnecessary complexity, and migrating the database to DynamoDB is not suitable for applications requiring SQL Server’s relational capabilities.

To monitor and remediate open SSH ports, AWS Config and Systems Manager Automation are ideal:

AWS Config Rule: Use AWS Config to monitor security groups and detect when SSH (port 22) is open to the public. Config rules can be set up to trigger remediation actions automatically.

Systems Manager Automation Runbook: Create or use a predefined automation runbook that can remove the open SSH rule from security groups, thus closing port 22 to the public.

CloudWatch alarms are not ideal for monitoring security group configurations. Amazon Inspector focuses on vulnerability assessment rather than continuous monitoring for specific port access.

Step-by-Step Explanation:

Understand the Problem:

An I/O intensive application on an Amazon EC2 general purpose instance is experiencing performance issues.

Users report delays or failures during intensive read/write operations.

The VolumeQueueLength metric is consistently high during these periods.

Analyze the Requirements:

Address the high VolumeQueueLength, which indicates that the EBS volume is unable to handle the I/O requests efficiently.

Improve the disk I/O performance to restore full application performance.

Evaluate the Options:

Option A: Modify the instance type to be storage optimized.

Storage optimized instances are designed for workloads that require high, sequential read and write access to large data sets on local storage.

This could help, but if the issue is primarily with EBS volume performance, increasing IOPS would be a more direct solution.

Option B: Modify the volume properties by deselecting Auto-Enable Volume I/O.

Auto-Enable Volume I/O is a setting that automatically enables I/O for the EBS volume after an event such as a snapshot restore.

Deselecting this option will not address the issue of high I/O demand.

Option C: Modify the volume properties to increase the IOPS.

Increasing the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) will directly address the high VolumeQueueLength by allowing the volume to handle more I/O operations concurrently.

This is the most effective and direct solution to improve the performance of I/O intensive tasks.

Option D: Modify the instance to enable enhanced networking.

Enhanced networking provides higher bandwidth, higher packet per second (PPS) performance, and consistently lower inter-instance latencies.

While beneficial for network performance, this does not directly impact the EBS volume’s I/O performance.

Select the Best Solution:

Option C: Modifying the volume properties to increase the IOPS directly addresses the high VolumeQueueLength and improves the EBS volume's ability to handle intensive read/write operations.

References:

Amazon EBS Volume Types

Amazon EBS Volume Performance

Optimizing EBS Performance

Increasing the IOPS of the EBS volume ensures that the application can handle the required intensive read/write operations more efficiently, directly addressing the high VolumeQueueLength and restoring full performance.